High quality coffee food and beverage products enjoy considerable popularity and make up an increasingly significant proportion of the diets of many people. However, high quality flavored coffee products are both expensive to purchase and to produce. One such reason is the cost of the flavoring materials. To produce high quality, flavored coffee products with realistic flavors has previously required the use of non-artificial flavorants (e.g., 100% real juice). However, real ingredients are expensive, and frequently hard to obtain in the quantities required. This results in higher production costs for high quality flavored coffee products that must eventually be borne by the consumer.
One such approach to this problem has been the use of artificial flavoring agents comprising a portion of the ingredients that can be found in real flavoring agents. The flavoring compositions, however, suffer from poor consumer acceptance because of an inability to reproduce natural flavor characteristics.
Additionally, as the popularity of more exotic flavor combinations for coffee flavored beverages increases there exists a need to satisfactorily mitigate the consumer dispreferred interactions between the characteristic flavors of the beverage ingredients.
Considerable effort, therefore, has been expended in an attempt to address the need for coffee beverages with enhanced flavors. Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide compositions and methods which address these needs and provide further related advantages.